Since it’s possible to “make it” by working yourself to the bone, it’s essentially your own damn fault if you don’t, and you deserve what pittance you may be left with.

This is dogmatic revealed truth for some people.

Take “God never gives you more than you can handle” literally enough, and if you aren’t handling something, well, you must not be trying hard enough, eh? Worse things happen at sea, you know! (That’s called the Fallacy of Relative Privation, for those playing along at home.)

Add in “God helps those who help themselves” and sprinkle in a bit of “God answers prayer” and you got a nice little philosophy, where nobody who deserves to be brought up can ever, or will ever, be kept down, and everyone who deserves to rise, is going to, as long as they work hard enough.

And you can prove it all with anecdotes, and if those anecdotes never happened, well, they’re True in a philosophical sense, and that’s what matters.

What is rather sad about this pet philosophy is that it isn’t really properly supported by the Bible as such. For instance, “God helps those who help themselves” never appears in the Bible. Prayer isn’t ever guaranteed to make a situation move the way you’d like it to in Scripture either. Popular aphorisms and attitudes are a poor way to approach life, missing out on the more subtle, important details.

nobody who deserves to be brought up can ever, or will ever, be kept down, and everyone who deserves to rise, is going to, as long as they work hard enough

The immediate contrapositive, of course, being that if someone isn’t successful, it’s because they didn’t work hard enough; a belief which is all of obviously false on the face of it, incredibly widely believed, and incredibly damaging.